On this coldest of winter days, I am remembering a phone call that interrupted our summer. I was nine years old and my grandfather had died. It was hard to know how to feel. He was so far away and we hardly knew him. My brother, sister, and I thought we should feel sad. But mostly we acted sad because we did not know what else to do. We had not lost anyone before. Now, in losing someone, we were learning what it was like to have him.

I was fascinated by my parents’ grown up rituals — shaving, make-up, getting ready for their adult world. I reached for the mystery of it, so present in my daily life, yet so far away from my own childhood routine. Religion was the same in my family’s experience. I observed my father’s prayer practice, hands cupped around his Buddha charms, moving with his breath as he kneeled. When he wasn’t looking, I fingered his display of small Buddha statues and ragged postcards next to his bed. My parents observed my world, too, taking me to Catholic mass on Sundays. Somehow, our different experiences came together, shared but not shared, connected by our interest in each other.

For immigrant families, starting a new life also means leaving something behind. My family, like so many others, left names. When my parents became U.S. citizens they dropped our long, difficult Thai name Komutdang and adopted the shortcut my father’s students used. “Mr. K” they called him. So we became Kays. My birth certificate has the old name crossed out, but still visible beneath the line, and the new one typed in next to it. My maternal grandfather had also been an immigrant, leaving India for Thailand. He chose a Thai name to match his new home. Though my name, a mix of our Indian/Thai roots and our new American identity seems completely mine, I recognize the fragility of both name and identity.

Do you remember the feeling of the swing set, legs pumping, head tilted back, heart beating? I remember it well, and the moment of daring, of jumping off and flying through the sky, not knowing exactly how I would land. That memory inspires this poem, but another memory as well. I was just four years old and I remember my mother telling me we would travel soon to Thailand to visit our family. We were standing at my bedroom window, looking out at the night and the swing set in our backyard. At four, that swing set was the edge of my world. I must have known that night that those borders were about to change.

I traveled to Thailand, my parents’ homeland, several times as a young child. To me, home was a small white house in Omaha, Nebraska. The only people I knew who looked like me were my own family sharing that house. So Thailand was both foreign and familiar, and waking up there after sleeping through a long plane trip, was like waking to a dream.